


Get More Milk

by apiphile



Category: Dr Who - Fandom, Torchwood
Genre: Gen, Time Travel, mission 00003, mission_central
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-09
Updated: 2010-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:22:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto recovers from "Cyberwoman".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Get More Milk

All was emptiness.

He felt nothing now. The terrible grief that had weighed on him like a second body hanging from his own, from every inch of him, had not dissipated, but simply sunk into the freezing black void that seemed to occupy his centre.

Every step was a grind – the gearbox governing his movements grated – but it felt perhaps just a little better to keep moving, to keep doing things, distant and mechanical. He tidied his flat over and over and over and over, finished old reports, cleaned and dusted and ironed and waited to feel a light at the end of the never-ending tunnel.

Ianto was so numb that, on the seventh day, when he sliced his thumb open making a sandwich that he was no more going to eat than the last five he had made, stared at, and thrown in the bin, he simply didn't register it. The sting of pain seemed to come for him from a vast distance, as though sensation was some planet in a galaxy he'd left behind. The red bubbling out of his hand and dropping in scalloped drops on the immaculate kitchen surface did not look the right colour for blood.

Ianto watched it for a while and then, still bleeding, threw the sandwich in the bin (the tomato slices were out of line. It was imperfect even before his blood had left a russet smear on the bread, and therefore not worth keeping). He wrapped his hand in a paper towel and disinfected the kitchen surface while blood soaked through in rosettes and spots that ran together, crimson Rorschach blots that all looked like nothing at all.

And the days passed, and like a wind-up toy which has not yet wound down Ianto walked through them, knowing that only his clothes held in the engulfing darkness, that he only _looked_ human. Clean, tidy, clean, tidy, repair, repaint. He expended energy on a flat he had never cared for or really even lived in before, and he did not sleep.

At first Ianto had wanted to do nothing but sleep. He'd shuffled into near-foetal compactness and stared into the night, watching but not reading as the numbers on his alarm clock faded through the cycle of hours. He wanted only to sleep and shut out the painful realities of consciousness, but when sleep finally caught up with him it was so dark, so horrifying that he jerked himself awake in a twitch of self-preservation and made coffee long into the night.

He wasn't sure why he decided upon mushrooms as the solution; perhaps to draw the nightmares to the surface and allow him to slip underneath them. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

"You look fucking awful mate," Luke said, handing him a paper bag. "You want to see a doctor, you do." Ianto handed him the money in silence.

At home Ianto laid the mushrooms out on his living room table. They looked like mummified foetuses, shrivelled and brown and disgusting, and he knew how bad they'd taste, the leathery, rubbery texture on his tongue, and he got a large jug of water and a glass to help with swallowing the chunks he chewed off.

He had not yet sat down to begin his binge when the air in the flat seemed to vibrate, filling his ears and his body to the teeth with a resounding _whomwhomwhomwhom_ and a kind of screech, like brakes. He looked up at where his unwatched TV had been and realised that he must have taken the mushrooms after all, because a large, blue-painted wooden box with "POLICE" written at the top and some windows in it was standing where the television used to.

Ianto looked back at the tray and counted the deformed fingers of fungus shrivelled upon it. They appeared to all be there, and the room was otherwise unaffected, but he supposed this might also be a hallucination. Certainly he didn't recall getting the giggles at any point, the way he used to.

The door at the front of the blue box opened. A close-shaven head with some impressively protuberant ears poked through the gap and the homely-looking man said in an unidentifiably Northern accent, "Sorry to be a pain, but you wouldn't mind telling me where and _when_ I am, would you? I think the navigational stabiliser had a bit of a hiccup."

Ianto counted the mushrooms a second time and came to the same number as before. "Cardiff," he said at last. "2006."

"Whoops," the man from the box said, stepping into Ianto's flat. He was wearing quite a nice leather jacket. "Not New New New New York, 8091?"

"Not that I'd noticed," Ianto glanced at the mushrooms.

"What're those?"

"Mushrooms," Ianto said as the strange man picked one up and sniffed it.

"Really?" the stranger put it back down hastily. "Well, each to his own I suppose. Don't s'pose you've got any milk, have you?"

Ianto did a brief mental inventory of the contents of his fridge. It was a _very_ brief inventory. "No, I'm afraid I've run out."

"Oh, well then." The stranger turned back to his box. For some reason the combination of mundane and weird was not penetrating his mind to any disturbing degree, but Ianto _was_ at least a little intrigued at last. "D'you want to come and get some?" asked the man in the leather jacket, wheeling back round again, turning on his heel.

"I beg your pardon?" Ianto asked, startled into excellent manners. Lisa used to joke about it. The more alarmed he was, the move Victorian he became.

"What's your name?" the stranger asked thoughtfully.

"Ianto … Ianto Jones."

"Well, Ianto Jones, your mission – should you choose to accept it – is to come with me and get more milk." The stranger beamed at him. It was quite a manic, crazed smile, and it looked out of place on a face that was clearly designed for dour expressions.

A part of Ianto that he had presumed dead, the part that had initially endeared him to Lisa and made her laugh and laugh, said, "My mother always told me never to get into police boxes with strangers."

The stranger stuck out his hand and said, "Well, hello. I'm the Doctor."

Ianto stared. "That's not funny."

"… was it meant to be? That's my _name_." The supposed Doctor looked non-plussed.

"_You're_ the Doctor?" Ianto muttered. All his time at Torchwood One they had studied sightings, been drilled on what to do: this man, this alien, this time-traveller was dangerous. A threat to the safety of the earth. The raison d'etre of Torchwood. Then Jack had come along and Torchwood Three were told "forget all that". And there were no more pictures. He wasn't sure what he had expected of the Doctor, if anything, but he knew he hadn't thought they were hunting a man who looked like Jimmy Nail's rock 'n' roll binman cousin.

"Yup," the Doctor said. "Coming? I'm bored with cow's milk, by the way, and I know this great place …" he wandered back into the box and Ianto, feeling nothing at all, not even curiosity.

It was very odd. This was definitely the kind of dimension-bending mushrooms went in for, but everything felt the same as always – the same black hole of loneliness and grief, the same numb body.

"It's bigger on the inside," Ianto observed, looking around at the strange interior of the box which was indeed larger than his whole flat.

"It is," the Doctor agreed, striding over to an enormous column surrounded by desks of switches and knobs and applying himself enthusiastically to them, like a kid at the Science Museum who just wanted to push _everything_ to see what happened. "Good, isn't it?" he thumped something and added brightly, "You may want to hold onto something, dematerialisation's been a bit - _finicky_ \- of late – "

That turned out to be an understatement of some magnitude. Ianto was forced to grab at a … sticky-out thing … as the floor gave a terrible lurch and the screeching _whomwhomwhomwhom_ started up again. For one beautiful moment his heart leapt into his throat as he wondered what the hell he'd let himself in for, but as the shakes subsided so did his sense of personal danger, and the darkness stole back in like shadows at dusk creeping up a lawn. The Doctor was giving him a laboratory sort of look, the kind someone might give an interesting specimen, and he felt for the first time in so, so long a tendril of fear unfurl in his stomach like a new-sprung fern. Ianto clutched at his support a little harder as the box-machine-thing began to shudder and shake so violently that everything began to blur.

With a dying _whomwhomwhomwhom_ they came to an abrupt standstill, and the Doctor strode over to the door and flung it open with what was clearly intended to be a grand flourish. "There," he said, as bright hot sunlight illuminated his face and the smell of a thousand spices and slabs of ripe meat, stinking fish, and animal dung rose amid the miasma of river water and human sweat in a lung-strangling perfume. "Egypt," the Doctor grinned at him and called over the hubbub, "At the height of her powers. The meeting of the two rivers. None of this Ptolemic rubbish." He gave Ianto a friendly pat on the arm.

Ianto wanted to tell the Doctor to stop touching him, that each pat reverberated through him like a hefty slap of self-disgust, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. "You come to Ancient Egypt for _milk_?"

"And to show off," the Doctor admitted. "Come on. If this is when I think it is, I know a woman who sells the best milk in history." He bounded out of the box and into the blinding light and Ianto came cautiously after him, screwing up his face and already beginning to sweat. "Goat, ass, buffalo, unicorn …"

"Did you just say 'unicorn'?" Ianto struggled to keep up as the Doctor – apparently comfortable in his heavy leather jacket and no sunglasses – strode along the pale rooftop they had landed on.

"Yup. In twenty years they'll be extinct, but now, before the virus really gets them – wonderful milk." The Doctor dropped onto some rough steps and looked up at Ianto without so much as narrowing his eyes against the terrible glare of the sun. "Come on!"

What was strangest of all was hard to tell. They seemed to go unnoticed, which was odd as they wore more clothes than most of the crowd put together and were ghostly pale of face by comparison. The other thing that, above all else, convinced Ianto that he was having one hell of a mushroom trip was the words. As he passed men hawking crocodile skins and women selling beads apparently made from whittled bones he understood their cries: "You sir, buy these for your wife", "you sir, this skin will last through a thousand rains", "you sir, out of my way".

"So much better than Harrod's," the Doctor said with what looked like a wink as he accepted a pair of live beetles from a wizened old woman in exchange for what looked like a box of Tic-Tac mints. "Want one?"

"What … what for?"

"Dinner!" the Doctor said, proffering the large, black, frantically twitching scarab beetle. "I thought you looked a bit malnourished. Although it may be closer to lunch."

The scarab beetle waved its antennae feebly at Ianto. The sun beat down on him like a fist from the heavens. Ianto felt slightly nauseous. "Perhaps we should just get the milk."

"Suit yourself," the Doctor shrugged, putting both beetles into his pocket. "This way!" He dived between two stalls into a sort of courtyard affair that smelt quite strongly of a wide range of animal shit. Ianto wondered how his brain was managing to conjure up the stench. Perhaps he'd shat himself, back in Cardiff. The thought refused to take root and instead he found himself being introduced to a woman of indeterminate but child-bearing age, dressed in grey, with two large-eyed children hanging from her like jewellery.

"- Jones," the Doctor said, as though he'd invented Ianto himself. The woman gave him an appraising look.

"He's thin," she told the Doctor. "You give him food before you take him home. He looks sickly."

"Can't be helped," the Doctor said as the woman sent one of her children into a nearby building, "he's Welsh. They all look like that."

Ianto didn't rise to it. The woman nodded curtly at him by way of greeting, and he managed a wan smile.

"Miserable dog," she concluded, and the child she had sent away came back holding a low, wide pan and a brown wrinkled hairy thing which was apparently a skin bottle.

"Which you want?" the woman asked the Doctor, gesturing to the arses of the various animals in the courtyard. Ianto recognised a brace of nanny goats, what looked like a largish donkey, and an enormous cowlike black behind which he took to be the aforementioned water buffalo. There was also a thing that looked like an antelope and a little like a wild horse and which could have been anything, really.

"The unicorn, again," the Doctor said. "My new friend here has never had it."

The woman grunted and took the bowl from her child. She got down into a squat beside the sandy-coloured animal, and braced the bowl between her knees.

"_That's_ a unicorn?" Ianto asked.

"One of the last," the Doctor said, "They used to live in huge herds, billions of them, all the way from coast to coast. The unicorn migration is an amazing sight just as the sun comes up – all their hides golden in the dawn light – " the Doctor broke off as the animal's head swung back to look at them. It was chewing something that looked blackened and coarse. It had a neck like a gazelle, but a short, stiff black mane like a donkey, and its face was more like that of a deer than a horse but enough like a horse to remind Ianto of one. In the centre of its forehead, equidistant between the beautiful, long-lashed brown liquid eyes and twitching, radar-dish red-gold ears, was a gnarled and twisted spar of brown-black horn about six inches long with a conspicuous twist in it.

It bleated. The sound was like a sheep that had been tuned.

"Males have a much bigger horn," the Doctor said softly. "The people here say its an aid to fertility."

The woman, still busily milking, said, "Is true. Tie the horn around woman's waist and she has a boychild. Man don't have to touch her."

"That's a unicorn," Ianto said flatly. His suit was soaked with sweat and he was starting to feel faint.

"Enough?" the woman asked, showing the bowl to the Doctor. He nodded, and she lifted it up. The Doctor held open the neck of the skin bottle and, still squatting with marvellous balance, the woman began to pour the foamy milk into the skin.

"Unicorn milk," Ianto muttered. What a strange trip.

"Pay up," the woman said, and with another smile the Doctor reached into his inner coat pocket. His hand came out holding a piece of rock which all but glowed at its core, the outside of which had the same grainy opalescence as frosted sugar, like the sugar mice Ianto had been so fond of as a little boy. From under the numb blackness he felt a scissor-sharp pang of nostalgia, of homesickness. "Pleceidian coal," the woman said, showing yellow and grey teeth in a smile that was more disturbing than delightful.

"See? Don't I keep my promises?" the Doctor gave Ianto another unwanted pat. "Come on, Ianto Jones, let's get this back to the TARDIS before it turns."

As they walked, Ianto found his tongue. "Who was she?"

"Oh, a friend."

"You gave her something from another planet." Ianto said, "We're not supposed to do that."

"_She's_ from another planet," the Doctor said. "Anyway, 'we' who?"

Ianto looked at the painfully bright sky. "Torchwood."

The Doctor shrugged. "She gets homesick. I offered to take her back to when her planet was still populated, but she's too tough to need that."

They were nearly at the rough steps that led onto the rooftop. Ianto could see the incongruous blue oblong standing tall and obscene against the skyline. "I – " he began, and the Doctor peered at him expectantly. He licked his lips, inhaled slowly and tried again. All he could think to say was, "I didn't need milk. I take my coffee black."

The Doctor did not smile and did not frown. He simply looked very hard at Ianto - _into_ him, almost, and said, "I do too."

It was, apparently, all either of them needed to say.

* * *

 

There were eighteen mushrooms on his living room table. Still none gone. There was sand in his shoes, and he had burnt across his nose and forehead. Ianto thought perhaps he'd have to accept that he hadn't hallucinated.

The unicorn milk tasted fucking horrible, though.


End file.
